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I am complaining today in relation to an ongoing issue with a recent stay booked through booking.com. I have used booking.com for a long time now and a Genius member level 2 (almost level 3). I booked a hotel to stay in, in Newcastle for 2 nights. I opted for the "pay at property" feature as I also do. On arrival to the hotel I paid by card at the property. We then arrived into our room which was awful to say the least. I wont go into to much detail on the room as this isnt what my complaint is about but for context we had 2 nights booked, paid for 2 nights, but only stayed one. After our terrible night in this hotel we quickly booked another hotel through booking.com for the second night. In the meantime I had contacted the hotel to see if they would refund us for the night we weren't going to be staying and they informed us to contacting booking.com. I straight away called booking.com and asked them if we could be refunded for the night we weren't staying. They contacted the hotel, to which their response was - of course - no. Booking.com as a gesture of goodwill to us paid us £15.00. We took the hit and were just glad to not be staying there again. Following this I noticed that the hotel had marked out stay as "cancelled" on the booking.com reservation. At the time I didn't think much of that. A few days passed and I noticed that I had been charged a second time for my booking at the Clifton hotel but this time directly through booking.com. I called up the customer service line, and this is where things start to go down hill. I explained to the advisor that I had paid for the room already when we arrived at the hotel, and I am not sure why the hotel have put us as cancelled when actually it wasn't cancelled. We had paid, and we just chose not to stay. The customer service advisor just did not understand any of what I was saying. The advisor told me that because the booking was cancelled and I didn't show up to the booking this is why I was charged. But I did stay, and I had paid. He then carried on to tell me that they are quite within their rights to charge me for the two night even if I didn't want to say. But again, I had paid for both nights on my arrival. I then ended up having to send proof of 2 payments to booking.com. Once this was received another customer service advisor informed me that my evidence was acceptable and that they would be processing the refund. He told me that it would take 7 - 14 days to arrive back in my account. 14 days passed and I still did not receive anything back. I called the customer service team, again, and was told on the phone that the hotel had made a claim that I in fact had 2 reservations with the hotel, which is why I was charged twice. This of course is a lie, and is the hotel simply trying to keep the money. The advisor explained she needed to contact the hotel and ask them for proof of the reservations and she would come back to me. After another week had passed, and I had still no information from booking.com I thought I should check the status of my refund. I called the customer service team again, and asked the lady to read through the notes to save me having to go over the same ground. She read through the notes, only to tell me that the refund had not been accepted and I needed to send proof of the transactions. I have already sent 3 images. One of my bank account with the purchase at the hotel, another from booking.com and a snip of my bank statement. I explained to the customer service advisor that this has already been accepted and that I just need this to be processed. After the advisor reading the notes again, she came back to me and explained she needed to contact the hotel and find out if they can provide evidence of 2 reservations. This had already been done, over a week ago, by her colleague and they have not responded to them. She proceeded to call the numbers on the website, to which both went to answer machine. I was then informed I had to wait another 24 hours for them to respond. I have been informed on so many occasions that I will be receiving a refund and this whole process feels like it souly relies on the responses of the cowboy hotel they have on their systems. Its quite clear what is happening here. Its also quite clear I did not have 2 reservations. I have been waiting for over a month to receive this £75.60 over payment and to be quite frank its completely unacceptable.
Desired outcome: I would like my refund, an apology and compensation for my time that has been spent on getting this resolved.
Booking.com has never seen the rooms they rent out. If you call you will be connected to someone that barely speaks English. We booked a room in Panama City Beach FL. The hotel is Holiday Terrace. The room was so full of mold on the ceiling I’ve never seen anything like it. They had sprayed air freshener to cover the smell. The combination of those 2 scents was disgusting. I will not get into how filthy the room was. Always try to book from an individual and not a booking service. Holiday Terrace should be torn down and rebuilt.
• Accommodation name and location: Home Inn SKG4, 4, Skeppar Karls grand, Gamla stan, 111 30 Stockholm, Sweden
• Check-in and check-out dates: 21/12/[protected]
We arrived at the property and found the place to be a big disappointment in terms of what was mentioned in the listing.
1). The property was in the 4 th floor and there was no lift. We are tourists and obviously we don’t come empty handed. We had quite a few luggages and we had to carry it 4 levels up. That was a big disappointment. ( all property listing should have a line mentioning lift is present or not- it’s our decision to take it like that or look for something convenient to us).
2). The photos in the listing are all not part of this property. The have added photos of some other place in this listing. The photos and the reality of the place is so misleading.
3). The kitchen is super small and it has a foul odor. Everything in the kitchen was sticky and no one would like to cook anything in that place. Only one person can enter the kitchen and if that person turns little faster, he is bound to get himself hurt somewhere- it’s that BIG!
4) The heating is not working. You feel cold inside the house.
We assume that a website like booking.com is reliable and we make reservations based on that trust. You have given a 3 star rating for this property. We believe the owners give real photos.
As we were not happy with the property we tried to reach the owner who was obviously not available. As we wanted the refund and we didn’t use the property, we cancelled the reservation. As per cancellation policy, we were informed that we cannot get any refund.
My question is - the cancellation is because of the fact that the owner didn’t provide us what was promised. It wasn’t cancelled because we didn’t turn up or any of our fault. Then why do we have to forgo our money.
Booking.com doesn’t allow us to leave a review of the actual status of the property as we had canceled the reservation.
My request is we should get at least half of the amount paid. The property listing should provide the true information or we should get the chance to leave a review.